Sabbath’s Theater (25 page)

Rosa made the gesture to indicate sometimes more, sometimes less. If he could just calm her down long enough to break through to the base instincts . . .

“Where does she get the money?” he asked.

“No comprendo.”

“Is this money she earns at work? In italiano, lavoro.”

“No comprendo.”

Trabajo!
God, it was coming back.
Trabajo
. How he’d loved his
trabajo
. Painting, chipping, painting, chipping, and then fucking himself silly on shore. It was just as natural as getting off the ship and going into a bar and having a drink. In no way was it extraordinary. But to me and Ron it was the most extraordinary thing in the world. You got off the ship and you headed straight for the one thing you had never done before. And never would want to stop doing again.

“How does Missus make her living? Qué trabajo?”

“Odontología. Ella es una dentista.”

“A dentist? La señora?” He tapped a front tooth with his fingernail.

“Sí.”

Men in and out of the office all day long. Gives ’em gas. That nitrous oxide. “The other envelope,” he said. “El otro, el otro, por favor.”

“No money,” she replied flatly. There was opposition in her now. Suddenly she looked a little like General Noriega. “No money. En el otro sobre no hay nada.”

“Nothing at all? An empty envelope hidden under fifteen nightgowns at the bottom of her bottom drawer? Gimme a break, Rosa.”

The woman was astonished when he concluded with “Rosa,”
but she appeared not to know whether to be more frightened of him or less. Spoken inadvertently enough, her name turned out to be just the thing to resuscitate her uncertainty as to what kind of madman she was dealing with.

“Absolutamente nada,” she said bravely. “Está vacío, señor! Umpty!” Here she gave way and began to cry.

“I’m not going to shoot you. I told you that. You know that. What are you afraid of? No peligro.” What the whores used to tell him when he inquired about their health.

“Is umpty!” declared Rosa, sobbing like a child into the crook of her arm. “Es verdad!”

He didn’t know whether to follow his inclination and put a hand out to comfort her or to appear more ruthless by reaching for the pocket where she thought the pistol was. The main thing was to keep her from screaming again and running for help. His remaining so calm while in a state of tremendous excitement he could not account for—he might not look it, he might never have looked it, but he was really a high-strung fellow. Delicate feelings. To be callous quite like this was not in his nature (except with a perpetual drunk). Sabbath did not care to make people suffer beyond the point that he wanted them to suffer; he certainly didn’t want to make them suffer any more than made him happy. Nor was he ever dishonest more than was pleasant. In this regard, at least, he was much like others.

Or was Rosa having him on? He’d bet Rosa was a lot less high-strung than he was. Four childs. Cleaning woman. No English. Never enough money. On her knees, crossing herself, praying—all an act to prove what? Why drag in Jesus, who has his own troubles? A nail through either palm you sympathize with when you suffer osteoarthritis in both hands. He had roared with laughter recently (first time since Drenka’s death) when Gus told him over the gas pump that his brother-in-law and sister had been in Japan at Christmas, and when they went to shop at the biggest department store in some big city there, first thing they saw up above the entrance was a gigantic Santa Claus hanging from a cross. “Japs don’t get it,” Gus said. Why should they? Who does?
But in Madamaska Falls Sabbath kept his retort to himself. He had got into difficulty enough explaining to one of Roseanna’s fellow teachers that he could take no interest in her specialty, Native American literature, because Native Americans ate
treyf
. She had to consult a Jewish American friend to find out what that meant, but when she did she let him have it. He hated them all, except Gus.

He watched Rosa
dovening. That’s
what was bringing out the Jew in him: a Catholic down on the floor. Always did.
You finished? Get off!
Whores can fool you. Cleaning women can fool you.
Anybody
can fool you. Your
mother
can fool you. Oh, Sabbath so wanted to live! He thrived on this stuff. Why die? Had his father gone off at dawn to peddle butter and eggs so that
both
boys should die before their time? Had his impoverished grandparents crossed from Europe in steerage so that a grandson of theirs who had escaped the Jewish miseries should throw away a single fun-filled moment of American life? Why die when these envelopes are hidden away by women beneath their Bergdorf lingerie? There alone was a reason to live to a hundred.

He still had the ten thousand bucks in his hands. Why is Michelle Cowan hiding this money? Whose is it? How did she earn it? With the money he’d had to pay Drenka that first time with Christa, she bought the power tools for Matthew; with the hundreds that Lewis, the credit-card magnate, slipped into her purse, she bought
tchotchkees
for the house—ornamental plates, carved napkin rings, antique silver candelabra. To Barrett, the electrician, she
gave
money, liked to stuff a twenty down into his jeans as he was pinching her nipples in their last embrace. He hoped Barrett had saved that money. He might not be fixing shorts for a while.

Norman’s first wife had been Betty, the high school sweetheart, whom Sabbath no longer remembered. What Michelle looked like he now discovered from the contents of the second envelope. He had once again directed Rosa to take it from the drawer, and hurriedly she obliged when he began to edge his hand toward the pocket in which there was no gun.

He’d been looking for pictures in the wrong room. Virtual replicas of his pictures of Drenka someone had taken of Michelle. Norman? After thirty years and three kids, unlikely. Besides, if Norman had taken them, why hide them? From Deborah? Best thing for Deborah would be to give her a good look at them.

Michelle was an extremely slender woman—narrow shoulders, fleshless arms, and straight, polelike legs. Rather longish legs, like Nikki’s, like Roseanna’s, like the legs that, before Drenka, he used to like best to climb. The breasts were a pleasant surprise in one so thin—weighty, sizable, crowned with nipples that came out indigo on the Polaroid film. Maybe she’d painted them. Maybe the photographer painted them. She wore her black hair tautly pulled back. A flamenco dancer.
She’s
read her Ava Gardner. She in fact did resemble the white Cuban women about whom Sabbath used to say to Ron, “They look Jewish but without the
ish
.” Nose job? Hard to tell. The nose was not the focus of the inquiring photographer’s curiosity. The picture Sabbath liked best was the least anatomically detailed. In it Michelle was wearing nothing but soft brown kid boots widely cuffed at her upper thigh. Elegance and filth, his bread and butter. The other pictures were more or less standard issue, nothing mankind hadn’t known since Vesuvius had preserved Pompeii.

The edge of a chair on which she was seated in one picture, the stretch of carpet across which she lay in another, the window curtains to which she made love in a third . . . he could smell the Lysol even from here. But as he knew from watching Drenka at the Bo-Peep, the sleazy motel was a kick, too, a kick similar to taking the lover’s money as though he were just a john.

After inserting the photographs back into the envelope, he helped Rosa up off the floor and handed her the envelope to return to the drawer. He did the same with the money, counting off the ten paper-clipped piles of bills to show her that he hadn’t slipped one up his sleeve. He then lifted the nightgowns off the bed and, after holding them in his hands a minute—and shockingly, to his surprise, failing to discover in the feel of them
sufficient reason to continue living—indicated that she should put them back atop the envelopes and shut the drawer.

So that’s it. That’s all. “Terminado,” as the whores who pushed you off them would succinctly put it the split second after you’d come.

He surveyed the whole room now. All so innocent, this luxe I disparaged. Yes, a failure in every department. A handful of fairy-tale years, and the rest a total loss. He’d hang himself. At sea, with his dexterous fingers, he’d been an ace with knots. In this room or Deborah’s? He looked for what best to hang himself from.

Thick grayish-blue wool carpet. Muted, pale plaid wallpaper. Sixteen-foot ceilings. Ornamented plaster. Pretty pine desk. Austere antique armoire. Comfortable easy chair in a darker plaid, one tone down from the gray plaid on the upholstered headboard of the king-size bed. Ottoman. Embroidered throw pillows. Cut flowers in crystal vases. Huge mirror in mottled pine frame on the wall back of the bed. A five-bladed ceiling fan hanging from a long stem above the foot of the bed. There it is. Stand up on the bed, tie the rope to the motor. . . . They’d catch sight of him first in the mirror, Manhattan south of 71st Street to frame his swinging corpse. An El Greco. Tormented figure in foreground, Toledo and its churches in the background, and my soul seen ascending to Christ in the upper right corner. Rosa will get me in.

He held his hands up before her eyes. There were bulging nodes behind each of his cuticles, the ring and little fingers of both hands he could hardly move at all on a morning like this one, and long ago both his thumbs had taken on the shape of spoons. He could imagine how, to a simple mind like Rosa’s, his hands looked like the hands of someone bearing a curse. She might even be right—nobody really understands arthritis.

“Dolorido?” she asked sympathetically, attentively appraising the deformity of each finger.

“Sí. Muy dolorido. Repugnante.”

“No, señor, no, no,” even as she continued to examine him as she would a creature in a circus sideshow.

“Usted es muy simpática,” he told her.

It now occurred to him that he and Ron had fucked Yvonne and the pregnant girl in the second whorehouse they’d visited that first night in Havana. What happened when they got off the ship was what happened back then in most of the places. Pimps or runners of some kind were there to urge you to the houses where they wanted to take you. They may have targeted us because we were young kids. The other sailors told them to piss off. So he and Ron were taken to a cruddy old decaying place with filthy tiled walls and tiled floors, into a salon practically barren of furniture, and out came a bunch of fat old women. That’s who Rosa reminded him of—the whores in that shithole. Imagine my having the presence of mind, two months out of Asbury High, to say, “No, no, thanks,” but I did. I said in English, “Young chickens. Young chickens.” So the guy took them to the other place, where they found Yvonne de Carlo and the pregnant girl, young women who passed for good-looking in the Cuban marketplace.
You finished? Get off!

“Vámonos,” he said, and obediently Rosa followed him down the corridor to Deborah’s bedroom, which did indeed look as though a thief had had at it. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find a mound of warm feces on the top of the desk. The savage license taken here astonished even the perpetrator.

On Deborah’s bed.

He seated himself at the edge of the bed while Rosa hung back by the disheveled closet.

“I will not tell what you did, Rosa. I will not tell.”

“No?”

“Absolutamente no. Prometo.” He indicated, with a gesture so painful it nearly made him retch, that it was between the two of them. “Nostro segreto.”

“Secreto,” she said.

“Sí. Secreto.”

“Me promete?”

“Sí.”

He pulled one of Norman’s fifties out of his wallet and motioned for her to come and take it.

“No,” said Rosa.

“I don’t tell. You don’t tell. I don’t tell you showed the señora’s money, the doctor’s money, you don’t tell you showed me her photographs. Her pictures. Comprende? Everything we forget. How do you say ‘to forget’ en español? ‘To forget.’” He tried to indicate with a hand something flying out of his head. Oh, oh! Voltaren!
Volare!
The Via Veneto! The whores of the Via Veneto, as flavorful as the perfumed peaches he’d buy in Trastevere, half a dozen for a dime’s worth of lira.

“Olvidar?”

“Olvidar! Olvidar todos!”

She came over and, to his delight, took the money. He clutched her hand with his deformed fingers while, with the other hand, he produced a second fifty.

“No, no, señor.”

“Donación,” he said humbly, holding on to her.

He remembered
donación
, all right. In the days of the Romance Run, each time you went back to the same whorehouses and you brought nylons to your favorite girls. The guys said, “You like her? Give her a little
donación
. Pick her up something, and when you come back you’ll give it to her. Whether she remembers you or not is another matter. She’ll be glad to take the nylons anyhow.” The names of those girls? In the dozens and dozens of brothels in the dozens and dozens of places, there must have been a Rosa somewhere.

“Rosa,” he murmured softly, trying to pull her so that she would slide between his legs, “para usted de parte mía.”

“No, gracias.”

“Por favor.”

“No.”

“De mí para tí.”

A glare that was all blackness but that looked to be the go-ahead signal anyway—you win, I lose, do it and get it over with. On Deborah’s bed.

“Here,” he said and managed to wedge the mass of her lower torso between his widespread legs. He grasps the sword. He eyes the bull.
El momento de verdad
. “Take it.”

Without speaking, Rosa did as she was told.

Secure it with a third fifty, or was agreement reached?
Cuánto dinero? Para qué cosa?
To be back there, to be seventeen in Havana and ramming it in!
Vente y no te pavonees
. That crone, that one old bitch, always sticking her head in my room and trying to hurry me up. A madam’s hard eye, heavy makeup, a butcher’s thick shoulders, and, after only fifteen minutes, the scornful harangue of the slavedriver. “Vente y no te pavonees!” 1946. Come and don’t show off!